


The Rashness of Coats

by genarti



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Banter, Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, Minor Injuries, background opium use, fashion - Freeform, minor injuries to fashion also
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 07:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4050850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Courfeyrac and Bahorel pass an afternoon with community organizing of various sorts, despite the occasional sartorial challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rashness of Coats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tritonvert](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonvert/gifts).



The day dawned chilly and clear; by early afternoon it was overcast. Rain threatened but did not fall. Courfeyrac, who was an inveterate early riser despite the company he kept and the image he strove to maintain, had made his toilette and fetched himself breakfast from the best of the nearby cafés, a small and habitual indulgence. He had then spent the morning assessing the various articles of his wardrobe.

He was a man who appreciated fashion. The power of a well-tailored waistcoat in a carefully selected fabric – the effect of curled hair, sweet pomade, a smooth chin, good soap – the satisfaction of attitudes that displayed one to best advantage with seeming carelessness – the pleasure of seeing oneself in a mirror and finding an aesthetic joy in the sight – Courfeyrac was sensible to all of these. In sum, they were an art to him.

Nonetheless, he had judged his art by his principles, and found it one best practiced under certain self-imposed constraints. The greatest artists in any medium are those who marry skill to deep consideration. There are many rich and fashionable men, in our era as in any other, who have used the cost of each season's standards as a means to ruin the aspirational and judge as artless and crude those who are merely poorer than they. Courfeyrac was determined not to be among their number. He held himself to a budget far stricter than his father would have allowed.

Lest we think him that miracle, a needlessly thrifty student, let us clarify: Courfeyrac spent every sou of his allowance, and wrote hinting letters home requesting more. He bemoaned the cost of books to get pocket-money. But what did not go to rent or clothes or pretty girls or novels or dinners, he spent on gunpowder, bullet-molds, pamphlets, bribes, the thousand miscellanies of revolution laid up against the day of their need. So far as clothing went, he judged it a private victory against parental expectations and the parental particle to limit the number of his coats and trousers and waistcoats, buy his cravats secondhand at the Temple, keep an eye to durability, turn a benevolent eye to mild fraying, redye wine-stained trousers, mend what could be mended, sell it back to the Temple in good enough shape for another to use. To make a fashionable appearance an art more than an expense. To that end, he now and again spent a productive morning sorting through his possessions to determine what was worth keeping, what needed a tailor's discreet attention, what was destined for a rag-bin, and what might most productively be sold or given as diplomatically as possible to Marius or Lègle or any of a dozen other friends in occasional need.

He had finished his sartorial categorization and was just considering where to lunch when he became aware of a distant tumult. It had been going on for some time; he had been too absorbed to notice, until all at once the matter intruded on his senses. The shouting was that of many voices, and he couldn't make out the words.

Courfeyrac threw the last coat carelessly across his unmade bed, grabbed for hat and walking stick, and hastened down the stairs in a schoolboy thump and clatter.

The noise was fainter by the time he reached the street. Courfeyrac had grown accustomed to his new lodgings on the rue de la Verrerie enough by this time to know that that was less a matter of acoustics than of genuinely lessened volume: the trouble was moving away, or dying down. He hurried towards it.

Only a few blocks away, at the corner of the busy rue Saint-Martin, he encountered an avatar of trouble whom he knew quite dearly. Bahorel had a grin on his face, blood on his knuckles and in a shocking smear across most of his forehead, and a badly torn coat-sleeve showing an expanse of fortunately unstained linen below. “My dear fellow!” he greeted Courfeyrac, with a boom of laughter. “You've missed all the fun. A brief party, but diverting.”

“Eventful, from the look of you,” replied Courfeyrac, only partially reassured by this sturdily energetic greeting, “but the fact that I'm seeing you so soon is admittedly evidence to the contrary – was it a party of any importance?”

Bahorel grimaced, then winced slightly as if the gesture had hurt. Courfeyrac smothered his own wince and fell into stride with him, turning their steps back towards his residence. “No. As a minor element of the season, perhaps, but in its own right? No. No planning, only a scattering in attendance, and most of them sadly easily dissuaded. Nothing left now but the spilled wine. Not even too much of that. I didn't see everything, but so far as I can tell no one went home to a different lodging than they started out from, either. I just look dramatic because I happened to step wrong and get myself shoved against someone's spiky iron railing. Quite nice vine-work it had, except for all the rust and snaggly ends, like an old man's teeth that used to be even. The coat's not old, either. Well, into the rag-bin with it, courtesy of our fine police and their regard for good fashion! You don't happen to have a spare I can wear home, I suppose.”

“Plenty, but nothing that will fit your shoulders. I do, however, have a bucket of water and a basin, and if you'll forgive me for saying so, you could stand to employ both. You look dramatic for more than the coat.”

“Ahh, it's that old eyebrow scar. Splits again if a fly lands on it wrong.”

From the look of Bahorel's swelling cheekbone, and from the fact that Bahorel's cheerful bragging had taken exactly the opposite line on numerous occasions, Courfeyrac thought that the punch he'd taken had been rather more than flyweight. All the same, this aggressive unconcern was heartening. “You know, Bahorel, some men employ a flyswatter.”

“Or a flywhisk? Do you think the new fellow likes them as little as his cousin? I shall buy them by the gross to fling through the windows of the Tuilleries if so. Ha! Maybe I will anyway.”

In this manner they conducted themselves back to Courfeyrac's hotel, and with a little effort of charm they ensured that Mother Veuvain the concierge retained her customary fondness, and thus that her customary blindness to any irregularities of her tenants continued to hold true. Courfeyrac ushered Bahorel upstairs to his apartments.

Bahorel shouted with laughter to see himself in the mirror. “What a sight! No wonder you were trying not to look like a mama hen. No, don't even try to deny it. You're as bad as Joly sometimes, my dear fellow. Never mind your basin, I should go parade through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré just as I am. Jehan would join me if you won't.”

“Yes, and get yourself arrested. A fine and dramatic gesture, but I insist on bail money up front if you're going to go courting the police in such a shameless fashion.”

“My purse is in the usual drawer of my desk. Just break in.”

Courfeyrac laughed. “Are you really going to?”

“It's tempting. I note the interest in your voice; I note the air of cheerful complicity. But no, I have business to be about this afternoon, more's the pity.”

Courfeyrac judged the odds of this business being related to their shared cause or related to Bahorel's wardrobe as roughly equal, with small side chances of art or Bahorel family concerns. He made an inquiring noise as he poured water into the basin of the nightstand.

Bahorel shrugged out of his coat with a rare apologetic look directed at its ruined sleeve. He reeled off a passage of Shakespeare, directed at that garment, which to his companion was merely long, dramatically sorrowful, and incomprehensibly English. This accomplished, he tossed the coat over the back of Courfeyrac's best chair – followed with his three waistcoats, still intact – rolled up his sleeves, and began to explain through the splashes and sputters of washing a bruised and bleeding face.

His errand, it transpired, was to meet with a man who knew many others of their mind, and had useful contacts among the glassmakers besides. Bahorel offered no name, perhaps knew none, and Courfeyrac did not inquire. He did, however, extend the invitation for Courfeyrac to join him. “It may be useful,” he said, “for you to learn each other's faces. I've been meaning to introduce him to more of our merry band, and you're much likelier to get along with him than some.”

Courfeyrac, uncertain how to take that assessment, made a noise of doubtful questioning.

“Ah, you'll see. He's a man who likes to laugh.”

“That only lets out Enjolras. ...And Combeferre, perhaps. And Feuilly would chafe at it.”

“And Prouvaire – ah, missed that spot, dammit – and Enjolras doubly. He used to be a schoolteacher, poor bastard, and it's left him with a chronic inability to listen seriously to anybody young enough to have been his student. I'm working on it, but it's slow going.”

“Enjolras is older than I am,” said Courfeyrac, in real outrage.

“Of course he is, and it wouldn't matter if he were twelve. He's Enjolras. But try convincing a man who doesn't know him of that. And try getting Enjolras to jolly anybody along, either.”

Courfeyrac threw himself onto the nearest chair, in spite of the clothes draped over it. They were all destined to be mended anyway. “You ought not to bring me along after all. You've prejudiced me against the fellow now.”

“Have I? Well, perhaps I have. No, but that's why you ought to come along. Dislike him to his face if you're going to, it's the only honest way. Anyway if you behave yourself and get along with him, it'll be a word in favor of the youth, and if you make an ass of yourself then Enjolras will come as a vast relief by contrast. You'd be doing a friend a service.”

“ _You_ are an ass.”

Bahorel cackled, taking this self-evident truth as the capitulation it was. “I have never denied it. Damn this eyebrow – Courfeyrac, I must beg extra handkerchiefs of you, I think. I refuse to go about with a bandage about my head all the way home for a little scratch like this, but it won't stop seeping.”

“Seeping, what a dreadful word. You sound like Combeferre. I will return the favor and tell you to stop poking at it – he and Joly always seem quite sure that that's a helpful step, and my mother always told me the same. Yes, of course, take a dozen handkerchiefs if you like. But I suggest that if your engagement with this idiot allows, you ought to have a glass of wine with me and see if that makes their loan unnecessary, while the last remnants of the disappointing party occupy themselves without you.”

To this proposal Bahorel consented, and they spent a cheerful half-hour dissecting Dumas' latest play over a half-bottle.

At length, however, Bahorel was obliged to come face-to-face with the monstrous choice he had been dreading: whether to force himself into an ill-fitting and unflattering coat of Courfeyrac's, which despite straining across his shoulders and sagging about his waist and falling fully three inches short of an ideal hem-line was the best fit Courfeyrac's wardrobe (still conveniently displayed across every stick of furniture in the room) could offer him, or whether instead to make his way home in a coat which fit him like a shockingly cobalt glove but was ruined by a shredded sleeve and several smears of dried blood. A terrible dilemma. Scylla and Charybdis were not more daunting. Bahorel thundered at length to relieve his feelings, while Courfeyrac ignored him in a companionable fashion. At last he chose as they had both known he would, and shrugged on his own injured rags. They set out.

Paris in the fall is like a soldier on the day before his return to duty. Winter looms, the air holds its oncoming chill, leaves have begun to drop, flowers are few; the city response with hectic charm. Everywhere the feasts of harvest, bright ribbons, music, invitations to dances, sociability frothing over, jokes and laughter, eyes turned resolutely away from the clouded sky. Paris has more gaiety in summer, but more charm in the fall. The Parisian spirit froths over in response to mild adversity. Only when adversity turns severe does the cat show his kinship to the tiger. It was not yet winter.

Courfeyrac and Bahorel strolled at their ease, with linked arms at once signifying friendship and obscuring the damaged sleeve. They paused at shop-windows, tipped hats and smiles at pretty women, gossiped of this and that. The Parisian flâneur is in his element in such surroundings. All that was wanting was a suitably decorative coat for Bahorel, and a short visit to his lodgings accomplished that. Jean Prouvaire was there in his shirtsleeves, dreamy with opium, composing a poem in desultory scraps with a notebook upon his knee. They both greeted him without surprise, though he had not been there when Bahorel left that morning, and carried on with their intended errand. The old article was discarded, a replacement selected, the outer waistcoat changed to match. They set out again. As Prouvaire had dozed off, they did not invite him to accompany them, but merely moved the inkwell a few crucial inches from his elbow so it would not be overset.

In a hat-shop they came across a stout old rough-faced woman trying on a bonnet. Courfeyrac started in recognition; it was Matelote, server at the Corinthe. Both men tipped their hats to her in silence, for they were unwilling to disturb a working woman about her own business. But Matelote turned to them with a bright smile.

No one would have called her features beautiful. But there is a charisma in unfeigned warmth and good humor, and Matelote had that in quantity; when she smiled, her face was illuminated. No one could help but respond. “Why, messieurs!” she said. “Good afternoon to you both. Here, you're gentlemen of fashion, you must help me pick. Which of these bonnets suits me better? My baby sister's getting married – you can guess where the party's to be held, of course – so I must have a good bonnet for the occasion.”

Her baby sister was a widow of fully thirty-five, but there is no less joy in marriage for all of that. Perhaps even more joy, for she had two young children and supporting them had been a struggle, and her husband was a widower who loved children and had had none.

Matelote displayed for them two bonnets of straw, the materials cheap but woven tightly and with skill. One had a broader brim and blue lace with sprays of yellow silk primroses. The other, somewhat smaller, was trimmed with rosettes of green ribbon and a striking cluster of white feathers. “Why,” said Courfeyrac, “they're both lovely, madame, but the blue brings out your eyes; I say the blue, certainly.” In the same moment Bahorel said, “The green, of course; the shape is better suited to your face, and feathers are fashionable this season.”

Matelote laughed, and in the next instant so did both men, and the shopkeeper, overhearing, joined them. “You're no help, messieurs,” cried Matelote amiably, “no help at all! For shame.”

“On the contrary,” said Courfeyrac, with a gallant bow, “we have assured you quite sincerely that either choice will be a worthy one, and that your taste is excellent. A choice between two good options is the best of difficulties. Side with either one of us, and you can be assured of a flattering bonnet at your sister's wedding.”

“If you'd like that bonnet with the feathers trimmed in blue instead,” the shopkeeper intervened, “why, that's no trouble, madame. There's a girl in the back to do just that sort of work when a customer wants. We can do it by tomorrow lunchtime, unless you'd rather wait.”

To this compromise Matelote consented readily, and made swift arrangements for the shop to expect a gamin to pick the parcel up if Matelote herself was unable to leave work long enough to retrieve it. “For,” said she, “Madame and Monsieur are very kind, but with him so ill these days, it makes us shorthanded, and Madame is obliged to do some of the cooking herself, and that makes for difficulties as well. Ah well! The wine's good enough at the price, and our customers are a good lot too.”

“Yes, how is Father Hucheloup? He'll be officiating at the wedding, of course?” Bahorel had been thoughtfully fingering the ribbons of a particularly ornate bonnet, but he turned his attention to Matelote now that the important part of her business seemed to be concluded.

“Well,” said she, sobering a little, “well. Well, he may! I do hope so, and so does little Louise. It's all day to day, I'm afraid – one day he feels fine, another he barely drags himself from bed, and it hurts and tires him so that we all wish he wouldn't. But he swears he'll preside – he swears he'll see her married and sign the book himself, and it would grieve him sadly if he couldn't. So I suppose he may well! Yes, he may very well. He's determined, you know, and a better physic than determination you'll never find, I always say. Anyway, a Hucheloup will sign the book, be it Mother or Father, and we'll all dance and eat carp and drink a dozen toasts, so the party will bear his stamp no matter what.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Bahorel. “Well, you may tell him that we're all drinking to his health.”

To this Courfeyrac added his sincerest good wishes, and the shopkeeper a promise of prayers to the Virgin. Their offer to accompany Matelote along her way was declined, for she was only planning to go next door for a new shawl, and so they bid her farewell. Courfeyrac, that terrible imp, took advantage of his youth so far as to kiss her hand and call her 'auntie,' earning himself delighted laughter and a rap on the shoulder. Bahorel contented himself with an exceedingly graceful bow and several remarks which combined compliments to both ladies present and insults to Courfeyrac's good name, and they took themselves off down the street.

By a coincidence it was at the Corinthe that they were to meet the ex-schoolteacher. He was already at a table with a glass of brandy. Bahorel hailed him, called to Gibelote for another round, introduced Courfeyrac as “a friend, in full agreement with our concerns.” They sat.

Bahorel's swollen brow, no longer bleeding but now surmounted by an impressive scab that bisected the eyebrow, concerned the fellow, but he allowed himself to be reassured by Bahorel's cheerfully dismissive manner.

Conversations such as these have a peculiar cartography. In many ways, just like any chat in a café; in other ways, not. They joked at the expense of kings and landlords, drank to health and happiness, made mention of newspapers, presented opinions like bets and took up the challenge. But there was also an underlying care. They had not introduced their names, they spoke little of friends except as a similarly nameless collection. They did not inquire after workplace, wives or mistresses, addresses. They circled treason as dancers turn each other about the dance floor: neither passing through that spot which was their shared center, over which their hands clasped. When the ex-schoolteacher rose to return to work, his belly full of oysters and mediocre wine, he shook both their hands and called Courfeyrac a fine lad (over that worthy's grimace), and to Bahorel he promised that visiting a certain other café on a certain evening would earn him more friends of mutual interest.

Courfeyrac and Bahorel stayed. They obtained dinner and dominoes and another bottle of wine. They wished to discuss the encounter, but besides that, their conversation with Matelote was still on both men's minds. “Listen,” said Courfeyrac at length, without a segue. “The Corinthe, Father Hucheloup – there must be something we can do.”

“About his illness?”

“About any of it.”

Bahorel grimaced. “It's a hard situation. He might mend, he might not – who can say? Not me. I know they've had doctors by, and good ones, which has to be a strain on the purse too.”

“Combeferre or Joly would take a look.”

“Quite likely, but they're students still. Smart men, you know I respect them, but they're only half-trained and you know it. More to the point, _they_ know it. I'm sure they'd do what they could – you could offer, Mother Hucheloup could ask – but an illness like this, it's not a matter of bandaging a cracked head.”

Courfeyrac drained his glass moodily.

“Still,” Bahorel added, “the rest of it, that's something we could maybe do. This is a good location, you know. There's a reason we met that fellow here. Plenty of working men come here on their breaks – you know all this, or why the hell did you move from the Quartier Latin?”

“Yes!” Courfeyrac straightened, his moment of brooding gone with the wine. “We come here nearly as often as the Musain, these days. We could make that more official. There's no back room, but it has other benefits. Not just proximity to the workers, though that's very helpful. The sympathy of the owners too.”

“We've got a few layabouts on credit,” Bahorel said with a friendly lack of censure, “but Joly pays for Lesgle and anyone will loan to another, and Enjolras only needs to be reminded he ate dinner for him to pay for it.” (No café owner had ever complained about this, but Bahorel enjoyed teasing Enjolras about his devotion to a higher plane at all possible opportunities.) “If Father Hucheloup's not cooking, the food here's no draw to anyone with coin to go elsewhere. They sympathize with us on politics, but they'll notice the personal help too.”

“Hell with noticing it. --Yes, I know, you're pointing out facts. But it's the decent thing to do, that's all.”

“Of course it is, that's my point too. Fraternity and community. It's not just speeches about them that matter. If you want to be self-righteous about it I nominate you to bring it up with the others.”

“You'll talk over me all the same.”

“Yes, and you will me – or rather, you'll try. I know you can't help being demure.”

Courfeyrac snorted. “A bull in the streets is demure compared to you, my friend.”

Bahorel grinned around his glass. “Ah, now you're flattering me.”

“Just because some of us let a friend finish a sentence...”

“I let you finish the sentences that are worth finishing,” Bahorel said, with an air of pious virtue that fit him as ill as Courfeyrac's coat would have. “Here, set up the dominoes, we'll play a round. You can tell me how you justify going out in those trousers.”

They had had this argument a hundred times, but Courfeyrac still rose sputtering to the bait. “Justify--! _You_ may consider it a statement of principle to spend – what, three thousand last year, wasn't it? – on a wardrobe to make the bankers shudder, but _I_ would rather not confirm their expectations of my priorities.”

These too were words like friction matches, tossed into the tinder of long friendship. With merry offense they both caught the flame. Gibelote, passing by the table, rolled her eyes and brought them another plate of oysters unasked.

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, apparently when I see a Bahorel prompt and a Courfeyrac prompt and a Matelote prompt my immediate impulse is to go LET'S JUST THROW THEM ALL INTO A BLENDER. I hope the result suits!


End file.
